Beautiful Wreck (73 page)

I drew
Swimmer
out from under my mattress, just to look at it. It sparkled as always, the bone handle seemingly made for my grip.

I couldn’t help it. I sought out the fight again, sought out the raven-haired wrestler, unable to keep from watching him. I looked, now, for every similarity. Rush got his opponent on the ground and punched him hard, swinging away on the edge of control, his muscles and bones moving until it almost looked like the wings worked and he was flying.

The hvalrif handle looked pale in the flickering light of the screen.
Swimmer
felt light and steady in my palm. I touched the point to the skin of my arm, to let loose a drop of blood, and as I watched it bead, I knew what I wanted to do.

I had the doctors go back over the places where my scars had been, and decorate them with my own blue-black ink. But not with the image of a raven.

Down the nape of my neck and onto my back, the powerful lines of a whale’s big body dove. I imagined it moving with a giant gentleness and confidence into unknown water. The split curve of another whale’s tail curled around my eye, above my brow, below my lower lid. Exaggerated, lush blue, it cupped my eye like a loving hand. A single white tendril of scar remained from my burn, a resilient mark, that became part of a blooming swirl of sea.

My wrist was encircled with more dark blue, twining sea shapes. Things that were near-runes, meaningless marks that almost, but didn’t, speak of the whale road.

Later, I wished the wrist marks didn’t remind me so much of Heirik’s silver bracelets. They made me think of the edge of a white sleeve falling away to let my gaze and my fingers inside. I went back and had more added, until by Day 99, the stylized images of whales and nonsense climbed my arm past the points of reminder—of bracelets, of bracers, of hunting gauntlets and arm rings. Beyond all those things.

“Day 100,” the room told me, when I woke.

A sharp blue ray came through the ceiling mist and pierced my eyes. This was the day that I would do it—read the farm notes and throw them away. I’d let all my love well up and flow over and then I’d stop caring about the past. I would stop dragging my fingers slowly up my wrist, my inner arm, imagining Heirik’s fingers there, remembering the small moments until they blended with the tingling on my skin. Stop pressing my small knife to my arms here and there like little tests, reminders. I would be courageous. I’d face real pain.

I did it right then, like a sharp and short rip, not a long rending. I pulled the diary up and let the reading tint close over my eyes.

I lingered on the transactions first, the trades and cows and days, with a fluttering in my belly, a hesitance to read the rest. With a twitch, I turned each page of the notebook. Twelve of them. I worked my way through methodically, reading every word, saying goodbye to each one. Goodbye to juniper on the soft skin of a throat. Goodbye to hands closing on black sand, to the scent of her husband’s sweat after haying. To sheep and horsies and violet skies.

My dry eyes itched. No tears came to hinder my contacts.

Sooner than I was ready, the love poem came—the last few lines of the book, written in a different hand. I kissed my fingers and tried to press them to the words, to seal them away. To put away the unknown writer’s yellow birch leaves and lattice of bones, but there was no real book to touch with my moist fingers.

At the end of the diary’s pages, trailed a string of random images from the ruins of the Viking house. Sewing needles, spindle whorls, a whetstone, a beaded charm, an iron ring of keys. My breath caught on those last two. Hildur came to mind. Her fingers clutching at beads or resting possessively on her keys.

I’d forced her out of my mind, hadn’t thought about her in weeks, but seeing that charm, her nastiness came back like a putrid wave. Her meanness. The big ring of keys that floated on my contacts looked so much like hers. I swiped them away, but they tugged at my thoughts, and I brought them back again with a flick.

Four small iron keys hung together, made for small locks on boxes or underground stores. Two of them had flattened heads a couple inches across, lacy with filigreed designs. The other two had been formed like cylinders, to fit into barrel style locks. Another key acted more like a pick. That one was for the dairy barrels. The longest key was as long as my hand, and it curved like a twisted hair comb, folding back in on itself. It had three teeth that fit into the pantry door.

So many times she had handed it to me.

I blinked hard and then opened my eyes wide, making the image larger. During haying. That was the first time that I’d held all her keys. When we got ready for parties and feasts, I often was given one or two to handle. The day I fell into the fire. That precious morning, when I thought for just an hour that everything around me would be mine, she’d barked at me to get fish and butter. She’d held the keys out at arm’s length, and they’d jangled, looking just like these.

I saw Hildur’s hard marble eyes twitching. Svana had once warned me it would happen.
Careful, Woman
, she’d said.
Where the wolf’s eyes are, the wolf’s teeth are near.
I thought she was talking about Heirik. Now I knew that Hildur was the one I should have feared.

My heart did not race with anger. It slowed down instead.

I sat calmly in the center of my bed, almost meditative, and small moments came back to me gently, like ashes on a light breeze. Hildur saying there would be no true wife until Brosa came home. Hildur talking alone to Ageirr the day of roundup, handing him something before he rode away to chase the other men. Her startling command that made me jump and cut myself.

I remembered a door slammed on that most intimate moment, when Heirik was asking me to marry him. The very next morning, Hildur had sent me to the pantry. I recalled her wicked hand on my shoulder, and something solid underfoot. I’d thought it was a toy, but maybe not. Was it her boot that tipped me into the fire?

On my final night at the Thing, her daughter was the last to see me. Svana had nodded when I left the booth. Soon after, Asmund and Mord—who had been securely tied—followed me.

For every terrible thing that had happened to me, Hildur was there. If not in person, then in some devious and hidden way.

Like ashes, these memories accumulated, up above my chest now. The pile rose with every moment recalled. My lungs felt dry and too full.

I pictured Heirik, the brave and terrible chieftain, dead. A young man alone, carried to his bower in the earth,
Slitasongr
by his side. And this room inside a glacier was my grave. Here on this colorless, pillowy bed, I would gratefully sink. I laid back, let my fingers spread open. I let the images go from my eyes, so that all I saw was the featureless ceiling.

“Jen.”

I sat up with a jolt.

Jeff’s voice called from everywhere in the air around me, the whole room amplifying him. “You need to come down to the lab. I have something to show you … off your contacts.”

Jeff hadn’t stopped trying to find something, anything, he could pull from my wrecked and shriveled contacts. They’d kept recording for some time, at the beach, before running out of power. He could see the record, but not the content, and so he kept working with them, on and off for these hundred days. A nerd’s dream, unlocking the evidence of time travel by digging into a midden of broken code.

I walked, stunned, down the hallways, my anger at Hildur a stone in my throat that I had yet to swallow. I wondered what Jeff had found. I had no idea how big this accomplishment was. Maybe it would be a single grainy image. Tenth century seaweed. A rock. Mist from the air conditioning hovered above my head, and I pulled my sweater tight around me, locking my arms across my chest.

The wall-sized screen waited, black and full of possibility, while Jeff mumbled commands. Morgan stood beside him silently, and I thought about what she might hope to see. A knife or arrowhead. She didn’t look at me, just the wall. Some code went skittering across it, a bright light flared, and then it was our beach.

The black sand. Somewhere near the fishing camp. The scene was life-sized, just as it had looked to me when I woke there.

Captivated, my eyes felt round, my mind slack.

The image cut out and came back a few times, with some slightly different angles on the ebony ground and silver driftwood. My hands clawed the beach, blue and clumsy. I was watching my own fingertips struggle. Waves pounded constantly, water churning and foaming, wind moaning, a dumbfounding rage of sound.

Then sharp voices made it through, and Hár and Arn were leaning over me.

Oh, Hár! I miss you.
I went to my knees on the floor of the lab and watched as if I were there again, on the ground before the old man.

“She’s alive,” he called. He and Arn backed away, and Heirik came and knelt before me.

I choked with longing, one hand to my chest, the other reaching for him. There he was, Undra Min. As frightening as the first time I saw him. A man the colors of wings and straw. Of blood. A touch of a smile came, brief on his lips, and I saw it—what I hadn’t seen then. From that very moment, he’d wanted me.

“My God, Jen, is he—”

“—Don’t!” I interrupted Morgan. My voice was vicious, my eyes intent on Heirik. “Don’t talk about him.”

I moved toward him on my knees until I could press my forehead to the screen, right where he would kiss me. The picture laid flat under my hand. There was none of his scent, no fox fur or iron. My breath did not stir his hair.

The sounds of the lab gave way to those from home. I heard the complexity within breezes, the whuffles and snorts of animals, soft susurrations of the house. The grass would be long on it by now, and emerald green. It would move with the air currents in silky waves. I closed my eyes and imagined the crackling of fire and water. I heard the sound of Betta breathing, lying in the brush next to me in the hours before she faced Hár on the beach. The rhythm was slow and steady, the confident life force of a young woman who, from where I knelt now, had been dead for over a thousand years.

Life was quick. But single moments could open and flower, and bits of time that fit between breaths could expand or deepen endlessly. Twenty years with Hár, a part of each day, maybe 20,000 hours in his arms, weighed against that single terrifying moment when Betta knelt before him and silently asked Please, don’t hurt me. Love me.

Gods, I was a coward. Raven starver. And so was my man. The chief and I could do better than this.

“I’m coming for you.” I let the words go softly, but they didn’t find Heirik. My breath came back to me. His image disappeared from under my palm.

Morgan’s studio was warm and redolent with scents of burning wood and metal. She’d called me here, on the last morning of my life in this time. I didn’t know why. Maybe to grill me one more time about the tools and all the silver I’d seen. I’d already told her about everything I could remember. About the many knives and hatchets and scythes, the keys, the torcs and bracelets, even the ring I wanted so much for Heirik.

But she didn’t ask me anything. She messed with something on her back work table, polishing something small in her hand.

Maybe I was here to say goodbye, then? She didn’t want to take the time to come down to the lab and see me off.

I waded into her haphazard place. Gods, what would Heirik think of it? What would he make of the great contrasts, the offhand wealth and filth in one stroke? Strata of junk and clothing and abundant food came with this life. A pair of flip flops moldered on the workbench next to the finest tools, shining and unimaginably precise. A lifetime of silver—even for someone as rich as Heirik—scattered on every surface, even the floor. A fine film of mold sloshed gently when I touched a coffee cup. He was thoughtful, his things minimal, ordered. He worked with plain tools, sharpened by his own hands. When he toiled in summer’s night, it was only by the light of the midnight sun, not a diode.